A Leadership Historian on the U.S. Presidential Election

Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn talks about the surprising election of businessman Donald Trump as U.S. president, and what leaders throughout history can tell us about bridging divides and leading in times of uncertainty.

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch. Leadership matters, and in the United States, voters have chosen their leader. Republican Donald Trump will be the country’s chief executive and its military’s commander in chief. He defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, an election result that defied expectations after a contentious race that in some ways defied history.

Joining us now to talk about this is Nancy Koehn. She’s a historian at Harvard Business School. She’s also the author of the forthcoming book Forged in Crisis, The Making of Five Legendary Leaders, leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Rachel Carson, and Ernest Shackleton. And she’s here to talk about what history and leaders throughout history can tell us about this US presidential election and the challenges ahead.

Nancy, thanks for being on the show.

NANCY KOEHN: It’s a real pleasure, Curt.

CURT NICKISCH: Trump won the US presidential election in a surprise result. As a student of American political history, did it surprise you?

NANCY KOEHN: Very much so. Very much so. It surprised me because the polls were so different than– they predicted such a different result and had for a long time. It surprised me because even I who believe that history can teach us a great deal or as Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself precisely, but sometimes it does rhyme.” I’ve built my career on looking at the rhymes in history with today, and I couldn’t find a very close rhyme to Donald Trump in the, if you will, the lexicon of the litany of presidential candidates through the last 240 years, so that was surprising.

It surprised me because it meant that the country was, I think, more divided and much more frustrated, much, much more frustrated and I think also angry and fearful than even I who am a great student of the power of collective emotion and energy to affect leadership, to affect large historical events than even I reckoned. So yes, it was very surprising.

CURT NICKISCH: What do you make of it?

NANCY KOEHN: I make of it that the consequences, and we see it already in all kinds of ways just less in less than 24 hours after the election was decided, the deciding votes were counted, we now enter into a time of much intensified turbulence. There’s been plenty of turbulence in the world that has been accelerating since the 2008 financial crisis, and in some grand sense, history is always full of change and destabilization. But we’re talking about an altogether different order of uncertainty, I think, uncertainty that’s breeding turbulence, uncertainty about what this means for the United States, uncertain around what literally he will do right now all the way to January 20 and beyond January 20.

Uncertainty about what this means for a global order that is fragile and turbulent to begin with, whether we’re talking about Russia and Eastern Europe, whether we’re talking about the Middle East, whether we’re talking about China’s purview in Asia, whether we’re talking about a United Europe, which is already disunited after Brexit, another surprising electoral event this year. So we already have a world order that is, no matter how you cut it, no matter how you look at it and historians like myself are paid to look at the big picture, that is fragile and volatile. And the leading power, a power that has historically and in our time been a playground cop, a dispenser of resources, a school principal, a map maker, a path breaker, a stabilizer, whatever else the United States has been, it has been a ballast that the uncertainty of that role as a ballast now continuing is very high.

So all those things create a great deal of uncertainty which feeds turbulence.

CURT NICKISCH: Let me ground what you just said about uncertainty and turbulence. In what we’ve seen in the first 24 hours since the election and that is that in his victory speech, the President-elect, Donald Trump, was very conciliatory. The current president, Barack Obama, Trump’s democratic rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, they both reached out pledging to work with Donald Trump.

The international stock markets initially reacted very negatively because of the surprise result, but in the US, the Dow Industrials ended the day’s trading up. So the first initial signs are of continuity, what you would normally expect to see.

NANCY KOEHN: So in his rose garden speech, Barack Obama and in her concession speech, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, talked about one of the hallmarks of our democracy is this peaceful transition of power and each of them pledging respectively to facilitate that to help that along. There is no question that a lot of people want the transition of power to be seamless. It won’t be seamless. It’s never seamless, but want it to be as smooth as possible given the divisiveness and vitriol of the campaign, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have turbulence.

The Mexican peso fell a very significant amount against the dollar. World leaders around the globe expressed uncertainty and confusion and fear about what a Trump publicly, publicly expressed fear from a range of countries, not just in Europe, but in the Middle East and in Asia about what a Trump presidency means. Vladimir Putin was excited and enthusiastic, but that is not necessarily– that is an indicator of more turbulence given his role right now in the larger geopolitical order.

And we had protests all around the country and around the world. We are talking about a world that’s reeling maybe a little bit strong but convulsed by what has happened, and it’s largely convulsed because of the kind of campaign that we’ve just lived through as voters and by the statements that Donald Trump has made. And last, but most important by the fact that this is a man who has a checkered business career and who has led a variety and taken some of those organizations into bankruptcy, but who has no administrative or government experience and who has yet–

CURT NICKISCH: –or military experience.

NANCY KOEHN: –or military experience and has yet to lay out for the public any concrete plans about he will accomplish some of the things he promised, including what he said in his victory speech, which we will make America great, and you will be proud of me. Important statements, leadership statements, but without any specifics. So he’s unknown, and he’s been emotionally volatile. All of that feeds turbulence, uncertainty, and fear.

CURT NICKISCH: So he does have international business experience.

NANCY KOEHN: Excuse me. He has international business interests and investments, and he sourced parts and manufactured goods internationally. That’s not what I would call significant international experience.

CURT NICKISCH: So the issue for you is just the fact that Donald Trump is an unconventional, outsider candidate, somebody who hasn’t had military or government experience, and question just how he would lead the United States going forward with trade deals, everything else.

NANCY KOEHN: NATO.

CURT NICKISCH: So it’s all kind of [INAUDIBLE].

NANCY KOEHN: A potential wall with Mexico, mass deportation of immigrants. I mean, again, those were campaign statements. But it doesn’t mean he may not demonstrate a very different way of being as president.

CURT NICKISCH: But we just don’t know yet.

NANCY KOEHN: We just don’t know. And I will say as a historian of leaders that the presidency is literally a jaw-dropping, an awesome set of responsibilities that most former presidents talk about that they experience it as such almost from the day they get there, and it changes people. So it’s entirely possible, I think. We don’t, again, have a track record that says it’s likely, but it is possible that Donald Trump will rise, both within and without, to the challenge and the responsibility and the authority of the United States presidency. Again, there is no track record, and there isn’t a lot of evidence to suggest that that will be the case. So again, more uncertainty, and what he has said is cause for concern among many different leaders and many different groups around the world.

CURT NICKISCH: So let’s look for some rhymes in history. Do you see a rhyme?

NANCY KOEHN: I mean, there have been powerful, charismatic, galvanizing, outside candidates. Teddy Roosevelt was such a candidate when he ran for the presidency after he’d been president. From the Bull Moose Party, William Jennings Bryan was a progressive candidate, not running from either of the major parties at the end of the 19th century. George Wallace was a man who trafficked and campaigned on divisiveness, particularly discrimination in a segregated society in the late 1960s.

We have had outside candidates. Ross Perot ran on a very different kind of clean up the American government, the American budget 20 years ago. So we’ve seen lots of outside candidates with a different point of view and often a different approach and a different set of promises to Americans. We haven’t seen one that has, I think, with the exception of, perhaps, George Wallace and certainly not in the last 60 years, that has made such incendiary statements about a whole range of people and in some cases parts of the Bill of Rights. We haven’t seen that yet.

Again, we don’t know that he’ll act on these things, but he said it, and that’s what we got. That’s what we elected. That’s why millions of Americans elected him on.

CURT NICKISCH: So Donald Trump is a departure from the type of candidate that you usually see in US presidential elections, but also the style. I want to ask about this coincidence, maybe, or a confluence of two very striking events, and that is the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, economic and political union and now this election of Donald Trump, another surprise result, another populist vote. Have there been times in history where these big, political earthquakes have come so close to each other?

NANCY KOEHN: Yes, there have. I mean, to take this, one of the most dramatic and dangerous, the late 1920s and early 1930s when, I think, again, a combination of circumstances from the beginnings of a great economic recession to a Germany that felt itself impoverished by the end of the First World War and the Versailles Treaty that ended that war to a growing social unrest that came out of larger forces. The late 1920s, 1930s when German voters rejected democracy, Italian voters rejected democracy, Spanish voters rejected democracy.

America came close in the 1932 election, not to rejecting democracy– Franklin Roosevelt beat the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover– but it was a time when the thread of bank runs and the number of homeless and the number of people literally hungry and on the streets was at a tipping point, to use modern language. And when the future of democracy versus some kind of more authoritarian government or some kind of more radical socialism was very much on people’s minds and I think looking back historically, a closer possibly than we’ve seen in our lifetimes and perhaps in any time since that. So the late 1930s when people rejected democratic institutions, established sources of power, and embraced authoritarian totalitarian leaders with cataclysmic consequences for the world.

Another example much less dramatic, but still very important was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

CURT NICKISCH: We’re right at the anniversary of it too, November 9.

NANCY KOEHN: Exactly. November 9. But if people were alive today that remember this, can remember, it wasn’t just the dramatic rejection of this, it was the extraordinary river of consequences that gushed across Europe after that. Arab Spring is another example of that. These are different forms, but they are dramatic, publicly-unexpected rejections of governing power structures. And they have as historians say, the ability. They do. What they do is they reconfigure, shake up, break up the tectonic plates of the power order, the undergird, the system of authority in place. And there’s all kinds of potential there for good and bad.

And part of the turbulence today is about that. It’s about both those. It’s about what good might come of this. Again, I suspect more from the bottom up than the top down and what real risks and instability might result from this.

CURT NICKISCH: One thing that’s always talked about is political divisions after a divisive campaign, and how could Donald Trump bridge these chasms?

NANCY KOEHN: That’s a great question, Curt. I think of people like Nelson Mandela or Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War– he lived for a month after the war was over– and even Martin Luther King after the Civil Rights Act, an enormous amount of divisiveness in American society fighting for more equal rights for African-Americans in the mid-1960s. Those three people and many other leaders who have moved through a very divisive struggle for what they believed was a worthy end, all of those leaders and many business leaders as well that I have studied that have turned around their company or saved their business, all of these people had the emotional discipline and then the consistency of action to turn away from the past, to turn away from what went wrong or all the divisiveness that was to face forward and say, we’re going to go forward together.

So Lincoln’s famous ending to the second inaugural “With malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us carry on the work we are in and care for the soldier who shall have borne the battle and his widow and his orphan. Let us do all we may to achieve a just and lasting peace.” So Mandela did the same thing when apartheid ended, and he became the leader of the Republic of South Africa. King did the same thing on many, many occasions in the late 1960s before he was killed.

So I think effective leaders understand that kind of piecing together why this went wrong. Howard Schultz did this when he took over Starbucks and it was flailing, I mean, absolutely in real trouble. In 2008, he made a pact with himself, no blame game. We’re going forward to transform Starbucks while keeping it true to its values.

So great leaders face forward. They stop blaming and looking to the past for who’s responsible for the division, and they figure out how can I help people heal and how can I empower them or inspire them to build all kinds of bridges on smaller levels in small groups, in larger groups, among one, among two people, among six people. So that is a really critical element right now, and it’s going to have to happen from the bottom up as well as the top down in our country right now.

CURT NICKISCH: You’ve written about Abraham Lincoln, and he was intensely disliked. I’m just wondering what kind of leadership qualities did he have that helped him bring people together to move beyond that?

NANCY KOEHN: Move beyond that, and hold the country, hold the North together in a time of unprecedented bloodshed and even division among families. I mean, there were hundreds of Northern families whose sons were fighting on both sides of the War, two sons fighting each other, in fact. I mean, extraordinary division and vitriol.

So I think Lincoln had a couple of lessons for us in this respect, for leaders of all shapes and sizes. One was he believed very, very strongly. He didn’t believe this when he first came into the presidency, but as he moved through into the presidency and as the war lengthened and got more bloody, he came to believe that his mission was to save the Union, which he always held as his mission, but then in a much richer and deeper and morally transformative version of that mission by late 1862 to end slavery and save the Union. So he would save the Union, and it would be a union. It would be a nation without slavery, without African-American or any kind of bondage.

And he had to get right with himself about that. He had to reach that decision and then say I am all in, and I am prepared to do what it takes to advance this mission. So his mission and his firm belief earned hard won over many, many months of debating with himself and then with other people, but first within himself was an important anchor for him and a source of resilience against all the onslaught of venom, toxicity, hatred, assassination threats coming at him, of course, not of course, but understandably, perhaps, or logically from the South from the Confederate states they had left the Union, but also increasingly as the war lengthened with no end in sight from the North. There were a lot of impeachment threats in 1864 against Lincoln. So anchoring in his mission, conviction about the mission, a sense of purpose about the mission.

Second element was he had a small, great group of supporters. It’s really important. This is going to be true for all concerned Americans right now trying to lead and perhaps help Donald Trump lead on a higher road and help anyone else leading on the highroad as we try and become active citizens in the wake of the election. I think he had a small group of people that offered him resilience and support, his wife, when she wasn’t depressed, a few close confidants in the White House, a few old friends, and those people helped support, literally feed and water him emotionally through the long days and even longer nights because he didn’t sleep as president.

But the third element was really, really important, and that was that Lincoln realized early on, this another important leadership moment here and Mr. Trump could learn from this, that you have to show up every day a leader whose eyes are on you. And this is true for mothers with anxious children. Its true for teachers walking into a classroom. It’s true for radio, spokespeople going on the air. You have to show up in service to your mission, no matter at times how fearful or disillusioned or in times even despairing a leader is.

Because people who are listening, people who are looking to you, people who are getting their cues from you are taking their cues from your bearing, from your way, from your comportment, and Lincoln understood that. So there was a famous story about a Pennsylvania Congressional Coalition that went to see him in the middle of the war, and he tried to tell a joke to them, and they said, how can you possibly tell a joke at this terribly sad time? And he said, Senator, do you think it would help our cause if I went out on the street looking as depressed as I feel about the fortunes of the Union Army right now? No, that would destroy the confidence of our citizenry, destroy the confidence of my generals, destroyed the confidence of our soldiers. I can’t do that.

So leaders have to cultivate a kind of emotional awareness and then the discipline to use their emotions and to show up publicly in service to their mission over and over again. And Donald Trump could take a page from Lincoln’s playbook on this, and it would serve him and the country very well.

CURT NICKISCH: Lincoln, it’s interesting because he was personally responsible for a lot of the turbulence and uncertainty in his time. He was somebody who, maybe, could have avoided conflict more than he did. And it strikes me that Donald Trump is somebody who’s talked about tearing up and renegotiating trade deals, changing US military stature abroad, rethinking alliances and how they work, also shaking up Washington. So he is very much responsible for much of the uncertainty and turbulence that he will lead through.

NANCY KOEHN: Quite a bit. Quite a bit. And Lincoln, by the way, I think 1.1 million Americans of a population of 33 million were killed or wounded during the Civil War. And so that’s an enormous number, 3%, just astounding and he knew how astounding it was and how terrible, the shock and awe of those numbers. He felt a personal responsibility for, in some sense having not, I think, in a very conscious way or in a very explicit way, whipping the nation up into not being willing to accept a brokered peace with the Southern states that recognized the legitimacy of slavery. I think Lincoln had a sense that he was part of the turbulence and that he had countenanced and prosecuted war to its very, very end at a terrible cost in order to pursue the promise of America that he saw as fundamental, which is a nation in which all men are created equal and are not enslaved.

CURT NICKISCH: You studied Lincoln and his leadership during this very turbulent time. That was the Civil War. You’ve also written about Shackleton, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I mean, these were turbulent times, not to say that anything that we may be looking at in the future is anything like the Great Depression or World War II or the Civil War, but what kind of leadership are you looking from President-elect Donald Trump?

NANCY KOEHN: Well, I hope I don’t speak for just myself, but as a leadership scholar, I can say I think at least three elements are really important that one is looking for. And again, leaders are made, they’re not born, so Donald Trump may, indeed, be a work in progress. He may get better and stronger and braver, we’ll see, or he may not. We don’t know yet.

Looking for the ability to communicate the importance of unity in a credible way, to reach out to the people that have in many, many ways felt ostracized during this election, not just his supporters, but a whole lot of people who didn’t support him who now feel very much outside the political system. That will be important. As import will be his ability to communicate, his willingness to work within the system in the democratic institutions of the United States. There were some of the things he said during the debates and on the campaign trail cast some doubt on that.

And I think a third thing that’s really important, and this is a little bit more abstract, but absolutely critical, is that all leaders that have ended up making the world better, pushing, if you will, the boulder of goodness forward for their country and usually in the case of the United States it has been for other parts of the world as well, have been people who transcended. It’s found a way, or they were transcended by virtue of what happened to them as leaders.

They were made into better leaders, transcending the ego, the narcissism, the drive for fame that pushes so many of political candidates and so many of us into places of influence and then transcending that to say that my work is actually for the work of the people that I serve as a leader, for the work of the people that I lead as a leader, for the mission that I offer and that people are signing up to follow me on or to be guided by me on. And so that the I of the leader becomes the thou of the mission and the people that one is moving leading along or taking along on that higher road.

So we haven’t seen anything in Donald Trump that evidences any interest in what most of us would call the higher road or our stronger self. May it be there, and may it come to light. Because everyone, regardless of who you voted for, who you supported, or what you’d like to see in terms of the next president, everyone appreciates a call to their higher self and as Lincoln would say, the better angels of our nature as a collective people.

CURT NICKISCH: Nancy Koehn is a historian at Harvard Business School. She researches entrepreneurial leadership and how leaders past and present craft lives of purpose and impact. Nancy, thanks for being on the show.

NANCY KOEHN: My pleasure, Curt.

CURT NICKISCH: I’m Curt Nickisch with Harvard Business Review. We’re on Twitter at HarvardBiz, follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn, and go to hbr.org to read and learn more about leadership and other business and management topics. Thanks so much for listening to the HBR IdeaCast.